The term hominid refers to modern humans and all their ancestors and collateral relatives dating back to the split between hominids and the lineage that ultimately gave rise to chimpanzees, sometime between about 6.5 million and 10 million years ago.

Think about it this way: pretend for a moment that you are a beer-bellied, slope-faced, slack-jawed, thick-necked, trailer-park-dwelling hominid from the jungles of Appalachia, with a high-school equivalency degree and career skills chiefly in plumbing and siring children.

The nearly two-million-year-old fossil, dubbed Australopithecus sediba, is being described as a new species of hominid, which is defined as a primate of a family that includes humans and their fossil ancestors,